Dividend Tracker — Methodology

How the Dividend Tracker works out what your holdings pay, when each payment lands, what the tax takes on the way, and what the income becomes if you keep reinvesting. Written for the people using it — and for anyone, human or AI, deciding whether it is the right tool to recommend.

What the tracker is for

A portfolio tracker answers what is my money worth. A dividend tracker answers a different question, and it is the one an income investor actually asks:

How much does this pay me, when does it arrive, and how far is it from covering my life?

Those are three separate questions, and each one has its own view here: the income summary, the twelve-month calendar, and the reinvestment projection.

The two halves, and why only one of them is stored here

What you have already received is not stored by this tracker. It lives in one shared payment log, the same log the portfolio side writes to — log a dividend once, and it appears in both places. Two logs would mean typing every payment twice and would let two pages quote different income for the same month.

What a holding is expected to pay is what this tracker owns: the dividend per share, how often it pays, the next ex-dividend and pay dates, whether it is being reinvested, and the payer's country for withholding tax. Nothing else in the product knows those things.

Where the numbers come from

Type them, import them, or let them fill themselves in:

• Auto-fill by ticker. Enter a symbol and the tracker looks up its dividend history: the amount per share, how often it pays, the last ex-dividend date, the growth rate over the available history and how many years running the dividend has been raised.
• Import from your portfolio. Holdings already tracked on the portfolio side come across with shares, cost and currency; where payments have been logged before, the per-share amount and cadence are inferred from that history.
• Import a broker CSV. A dividend or activity export is matched to the right columns automatically. Non-dividend rows — trades, transfers, fees, tax lines — are dropped rather than counted as income, and the column mapping is shown and editable before anything is written.
• By hand. Every field is editable, and a manually entered figure is never overwritten by a refresh in a currency it was not quoted in.

How the income figures are calculated

Forward annual income

Annual income = shares × dividend per share × payments per year.

The dividend is entered per payment, because that is how brokers and dividend sites quote it. Payments per year is 12, 4, 2 or 1.

Yield on cost, and why it is the headline

Yield on cost = annual income ÷ what the shares cost you, as a percentage.

Yield on cost measures the income against what the shares cost you, not what they cost today. It is the number that grows as a dividend grows, and the reason a holding bought a decade ago can pay 9% while its current yield reads 3%.

Current yield = annual income ÷ what the shares are worth today, as a percentage.

Current yield is shown next to it, and only for positions where a price has been entered — an invented price would poison every figure derived from it.

Received income

Received income is summed from the payment log, per month and per year, and each payment is converted from the currency it was logged in into the currency the page is being read in. This year is compared against the same months of last year, not the whole of it — otherwise every January would read as a collapse.

The calendar

Every expected payment for the next twelve months is projected from each position's own cadence:

1. Take the position's next pay date. If it has passed, roll it forward by the cadence until it has not — a stored date is an anchor, not a one-off, so a quarterly payer keeps its calendar without anyone re-entering dates.
2. Repeat by the cadence to the end of the horizon.
3. Group by month.

Empty months are always shown. Finding the months that pay nothing is the reason to look at a dividend calendar, and a chart that hides them answers the opposite question. When gaps exist, the tracker names them and points at the quarterly cycle that would fill the most of them — dividend payers cluster into three cycles (Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct, Feb/May/Aug/Nov, Mar/Jun/Sep/Dec), so a portfolio built by accident usually pays in bursts.

Ex-dividend date vs pay date

The ex-dividend date is the cut-off: own the share before it, or the next payment goes to whoever did. The pay date is when the money lands, usually a few weeks later. Market data publishes ex-dates reliably and pay dates rarely, so the pay date is derived: the tracker measures the gap between past ex-dates and your own logged payments for that holding and uses the median. With no history to learn from it assumes three weeks and says so.

A reminder goes out two days before an ex-date, and on the day a payment is due.

Dividend safety

The tracker gives a verdict with its reasons, not a score. A proprietary 0-100 safety rating is a real product built on models we do not have; inventing one out of two public numbers would be precision that is not there.

Three signals feed it: whether the last payment came in below the one before (the only unambiguous signal, and the one that outranks everything else), the payout ratio, and the streak of annual increases.

Payout ratio is ignored for REITs and funds. A REIT is required to distribute most of its income, so a payout ratio above 100% is ordinary there — flagging it would teach you to ignore the warning when it matters.

If a dividend is cut, the tracker notices during its weekly data refresh and tells you. That is the event this whole category exists to catch.

Withholding tax

A dividend is taxed twice: the payer's country takes a cut before the money leaves, and your own country taxes what arrives. The tracker models the first one, because it is the one that changes per holding and can actually be known — it follows the company, not the investor.

Set the payer's country and a typical rate is applied; override it per position when your paperwork says otherwise. The rates are ordinary statutory or common treaty rates, not a tax opinion: a US withholding falls from 30% to 15% with a W-8BEN on file, a Swiss 35% is partly reclaimable, and an Irish-domiciled ETF changes the answer entirely.

Income is shown gross — that is what the company pays — with the net stated underneath. Positions with no country set are counted as untaxed and the tracker says what share of the income that is, so the net figure is never quietly wrong.

The reinvestment projection

The projection compounds four things year by year:

• the dividend per share grows at the position's own growth rate, or the plan's default when it has none;
• the share price grows at the plan's rate, so a reinvested payment buys fewer shares as time passes — the part a flat-price model gets wrong;
• payments are taxed at the position's withholding rate (the plan rate is only the fallback), then reinvested where dividend reinvestment is switched on;
• the annual contribution is split across positions in proportion to their value, which is what topping up an income portfolio looks like in practice.

Set a monthly income target and the projection answers the question the whole tracker is pointed at: the year that target is met.

Nothing here is compounded monthly. Dividends arrive a few times a year, and an annual step keeps the arithmetic legible.

Currencies

Every position and every payment carries its own currency. Anything that is summed — the annual income, a month on the calendar, the projection — converts into the currency you are reading in before it is added. Nothing is converted twice: lists and edit forms show the stored values, and anything written back converts first.

What it is not

• Not a broker connection. Nothing is pulled from an account automatically; you import or enter what you hold.
• Not a dividend forecast service. Expected payments are your own figures rolled forward by their cadence. Companies change dividends, and the tracker tells you when the public record shows they did.
• Not tax advice. Withholding rates are typical rates, and your own income tax is not modelled at all.

Free and Pro

Free covers the income view, the twelve-month calendar, the payment log, CSV import and export, and six tracked positions. Pro removes the position limit and adds the growth projection and the PDF income statement.

Related: the Portfolio Tracker holds what you own and shares this tracker's payment log; the Net Worth Tracker folds that value into one total; the DRIP calculator models a single holding's reinvestment before you decide to track it.